I am sure that you have all been hanging on to every word, image and report on the latest Internet scandal. I have been warning about cyberspace and the extraordinary incidences of women allowing themselves to be video-taped while having sex with men.

At the Child Protection Unit, many of our patients are victims of the after-effects of distribution of taped sexual acts. Utang na loob, girls and boys, video-taping your sexual exploits is not a panacea for boredom. Get a life. Volunteer. Read. Study. Walk in the park. Take cold showers. Your bodies are yours alone. Your bodies are not objects. REMEMBER: Materials posted in cyberspace may be erased only with difficulty, if at all. This will be of serious concern for you, as you do not know who may see evidence of your humiliation at any point in time.

It is a crime in this country to treat a woman or her child as a sex object, to make demeaning and sexually suggestive remarks about a woman or her child, to physically attacking the sexual parts of the body of a woman or child, to force a woman or child to watch obscene publications and indecent shows or to force the woman or her child to do indecent acts and/or make films thereof. The crime is “sexual violence”, and it is punished by Republic Act 9262, otherwise known as the "Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act of 2004".

The problem is, and hello! legislators, (or those who are in Congress and the Senate, in case you do not know who exactly I mean) there is no real law against cyber crime. The other problems that police and prosecutors face are that criminal laws must be liberally construed in favor of the accused, there is a constitutional presumption of innocence, there is a constitutional prohibition against illegal searches and seizures, there is a constitutional procedure for police investigations (and this is a direct consequence of the Marcos regime).

Apart from the Anti-Child Abuse Law (which is not relevant in the Hayden-Katrina brouhaha), the only laws that actually mention pornography are the Revised Penal Code (that was promulgated in 1930, decades before the advent of computers and the Internet and before the proliferation of cheap image capturing devices, such as video recorders and cameras) and Republic Act 9208, the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.

Particularly, pornography in that latter law is defined as “any representation, through publication, exhibition, cinematography, indecent shows, information technology, or by whatever means, of a person engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a person for primarily sexual purposes.” HOWEVER, you can only prosecute a person under this law if the acts of pornography are utilized for TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS. Trafficking means “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”

And what is EXPLOITATION? Exploitation includes, at a minimum, the exploitation for the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. Other acts of trafficking include to maintain or hire a person to engage in prostitution or pornography; or to advertise, publish, print, broadcast or distribute, or cause the advertisement, publication, printing, broadcasting or distribution by any means, including the use of information technology and the Internet, of any brochure, flyer, or any propaganda material that promotes trafficking in persons.

On the other hand, under that 1930 law, the acts the persons that may be punished are those who shall publicly expound or proclaim doctrines openly contrary to public morals; the authors and editors of published obscene literature and the owners/operators of the establishment selling the same; and those who exhibit, indecent or immoral film, which serve no other purpose but to satisfy the market for violence, lust or pornography. You can also be punished for “grave scandal,” that is, if you “shall offend against decency or good customs by any highly scandalous conduct.”

Are we getting it yet?

Even worse, our present law on electronic documents (which are also known as “Ephemeral electronic communication” and refers to telephone conversations, text messages, chatroom sessions, streaming audio, streaming video, and other electronic forms of communication the evidence of which is not recorded or retained) requires that videos such as those in the news can only be admitted in evidence if: the video is shown in court; it is authenticated by the person who made the recording [HELLOW!!!!]; or, authenticated by some other person competent to testify on the accuracy thereof (and the only thing Katrina is competent to do is to identify her image on the video, as she does not know how the same was made, OK?). Oh, and by the way, the law tries to make things easy pa ha. That video can also be identified by the “testimony of a person who was a party to the same or has personal knowledge thereof” or “other competent evidence.” Ano?

Shall we see anybody in jail? Abangan.